Ashley Judd pressing charges over vulgar tweets

Ashley Judd says she is pressing charges against "Twitter trolls" who tweeted highly explicit verbal abuse at the actress following her own tweet at a college basketball game.

"The amount of gender violence that I experience is absolutely extraordinary," the "Insurgent" star told national correspondent Craig Melvin in a "Today" show report that aired Tuesday. "And a significant part of my day today will be spent filing police reports at home about gender violence that's directed at me on social media."

She added that although she does not anticipate that the cases will be prosecuted vigorously, she wanted to send a message.

During the Southeastern Conference championship game Sunday, avid University of Kentucky Wildcats fan Judd, 46, wrote a since-deleted tweet saying the rival University of Arkansas Razorbacks (who would lose the game to No. 1 seed Kentucky) were playing dirty. This elicited a barrage of vulgar and highly personal responses from self-proclaimed Razorbacks fans, which continued into Tuesday.

The widely circulated photograph of Judd giving ESPN analyst Dick Vitale a "good luck" kiss on the mouth at the game was also misinterpreted on social media.

"The way things happen on social media is abusive and everyone needs to take personal responsibility for what they write and not allowing this misinterpretation and shaming culture on social media to persist," Judd told MSNBC anchor Thomas Roberts Monday in a segment included in the "Today" show report, adding, "And, by the way, I'm pressing charges."

Twitter responded in a statement to NBC News, saying, "We now review five times as many user reports as we did previously and we have tripled the size of the support team focused on the handling of these reports."